Defence

As wars begin to end, arguments about their conduct begin. Such is the case with the British campaign in Helmand. In a submission to the Foreign Affairs Committee, the former British ambassador in Kabul – and one of the best diplomats of his generation – Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles blasted the Army: "Almost by definition, good soldiers are irrepressibly enthusiastic, unquenchably optimistic, fiercely loyal to their service and to their own units within that service, and not especially imaginative." But his strongest criticism was reserved for the Army's strategy of seeing Helmand through the prism of the SDSR – looking to save brigades from being cut, not looking primarily to win the war.

With 2011 promising to be another difficult year in Afghanistan, my friend Alex Strick van Linschoten – a noted scholar of the region – has decided to do something to help. He is organising to get some charcoal to refugee families from Helmand, who have fled the fighting between NATO and the Taliban and now live at a makeshift refugee camp just outside Kabul City. Like millions of refugees, the people at the camp have seen things they will rarely forget: "The sight of a woman’s hair entangled in the mulberry branches, her legs strewn far away in the dirt. Or the sounds they heard as they hid in an underground hole, counting the bombs to pass the time, praying the American troops would leave.

Barack Obama has had a great couple of weeks. First DADT was repealed and then START was ratified by the Senate, safeguarding a major Obama foreign policy initiative In truth, both issues are peripheral to voter concerns. To them, the jobless recovery is what matters. New figures show that the unemployment rate in the US has jumped to a seven-month high of 9.8 per cent. Nor did the White House get all it wanted from Congress recently. As the Senate was debating DADT, the House of Representatives killed a provision in a defence bill to transfer detainees from Guantanamo to the US. But in politics having momentum - the Big Mo - is one of the most important, if intangible, factors. Recently, Obama could not even find Lil' Mo, Big Mo's smaller brother.

At a speech to the Royal Defence Academy earlier in the year, Andrew Mitchell outlined the costs of overseas conflict to Britain and offered a number of lessons for the future. The most important, he argued, was the need to help prevent wars before they start, starting with being “better at identifying the potential for conflict.” The Cabinet’s only ex-soldier, Mitchell has seen up close the cost of conflict, burns with anger about the Rwandan genocide and knows that development funds will forever be wasted if people are mired in violent conflict.

The coalition is taking it to the MoD, Whitehall’s most intransigent department.  The FT’s Alex Barker reports that Bernard Gray has been appointed Chief of Defence Materiel.  Gray is a revered and original defence specialist with a history of criticising the MoD in plain terms. Resentment persists over his savage report into procurement, which exposed the full extent of the wasteful ‘conspiracy of optimism’ that pervades the department’s operations and its relations with contractors. He argued: ‘Industry and the Armed Forces have a joint vested interest in sponsoring the largest programme at the lowest apparent cost in a ‘conspiracy of optimism’.

The Iraq Inquiry had been conspicuously silent, but now John Chilcot's team has called Tony Blair to give evidence again. It's expected that our former PM will make the trip to the Queen Elizabeth II centre early next year. That would push the expected deadline for the inquiry's work finishing – at the end of this year – into 2011. Few people, however, expect the inquiry to say anything novel or get Tony Blair to say anything different than before. Its well-phrased final report may change policy in the margins – but in the security establishment there is little question of what needs doing.

Now the Wikileaks are beginning to become dangerous. Before, the leaks contained high-level tittle-tattle, confirmation of existing analyses and embarrassingly accurate portraits of world leaders. I still thought it wrong to regurgitate this data, as it will lead to more secrecy, bilateral problems and potentially even conflicts – the things that Julian Assange claims he is seeking to avoid. Yet I told NPR that the idea of prosecuting the Wikileaks founder for treason was far-fetched; he is not a US citizen and it was not clear to me what kind of charges could be brought against him in the US courts. Now, however, with the publication of data which will be useful background reading for any would-be terrorist, the situation has changed.

Like everyone else, I have poured over the latest cache of Wikileaks - the publication of which I find irresponsible and destructive. There are several pieces of information now in the public domain that will cause the US diplomatic embarrassment or worse may even help the regimes in Tehran, Pyongyang and Moscow. Just ask yourself a few questions. Will the West be safer if the Saudi leader cannot trust that a conversation he has with a US envoy will remain secret? Will that help or hinder Iran's nuclear prpgramme? Will US-German links be improved by the knowledge that US diplomats are sceptical of Angela Merkel's policies? Will that aid G20 coordination or hamper it?

Nato leaders are in Lisbon and Daniel Korski has argued that the most successful military alliance in history isn’t done yet. Writing in the Independent, Patrick Cockburn gives an alternative. He contends that Nato will never recover from the Afghan mission, and he has three substantive points: 1). Nato's solutions are the problem. ‘It is not just that the war is going badly, but that Nato's need to show progress has produced a number of counter-productive quick fixes likely to deepen the violence. These dangerous initiatives include setting up local militias to fight the Taliban where government forces are weak. These are often guns-for-hire provided by local warlords who prey on ordinary Afghans.’ 2).